The reality of rejection is not a new topic for lit mags or bookish media, and what often follows these articles is the chorus of authors who have had some kind of publishing success, or, in my case (and in the cases of countless others like me), at least enough success to feel comfortable sharing about rejection and to be able to conceptualize it as a pathway to print.

However, without a book or two, or at least a string of magazine appearances, those rejection numbers, whether it’s nine or 19 or 98, feel less like a badge of honor. I certainly wouldn’t have shared my number if my manuscript were not under contract. In fact, I had a higher number for my first novel, and I never talked about it frankly until the book was out. I also didn’t talk about how one agent wrote to me and said they could maybe sell it if I made the main character male instead of female. And I didn’t discuss the angry rejections I got—because my protagonist was so “unlikable”—I just kept trying to place it. As Roxane Gay has written, on Twitter and elsewhere, it’s important to not let rejection be validation.

While it’s true that writers absolutely must believe in their own work, must try to cultivate a thick skin, must be polite to editors (please, please be polite to editors), rejection and everything that comes with it—doubt, disappointment, demoralization—is real, and if we care about cultivating new voices, we must ask how we, as a community, can do better than patting ourselves on the back for our own moxie.

Recently, a writer emailed me and said she had been rejected a handful of times for her YA novel. I told her, nicely, I thought, that until she got to 100, she should get over it. She didn’t write me back.

I’ve said this so many times, to so many aspiring writers, this “100 rejections” thing. I’ve said it on panels. I’ve said it in workshops. I’ve said it in topical conversations and casual ones. I said it at a pizza place during a birthday party for a cousin when I was talking about having a day job.

I keep thinking about this. Emerging writers already know how hard it is. Shouldn’t we, instead of continuing the “tough it out” conversation, be more transparent about our own experiences and challenges?

(I’m not naïve about my particular contribution to this conversation—but four years ago, which is not so long, before my first book, I was just another writer in the slush. I never considered that I’d stop writing, but I did start to believe I would never have my own name on my own spine.)

Perhaps it’s better to make a different point, like about how unpredictable writing can be. For example, my most-read work to date is not the stories I worked on for over a decade, it’s not the novel I spent eight years on, it’s a guest post I dashed off about how many books don’t sell.

Or, how once, I had a story accepted in a print publication because I guess they liked it well enough but mostly they needed a very specific word count for their layout. I know this because the editor told me. I’m not really sure why he told me. I’m not sure what I was supposed to do with this information. It’s a decent magazine, and I submitted because I had read it, so now it’s there on my publication list with everything else.

A few weeks ago on the Brevity blog, Allison K. Williams wrote about literary citizenship and the value we get from helping others alongside imploring writers to do their homework. Learn the business she says, because it is a business.

There’s certainly no obligation to share trusted contacts or make introductions to friendlies, and we don’t have to offer guidance towards specific publication outlets: it’s old, old advice, but writers should get a sense of who their targets are via their reading habits.

Still, in terms of the woman who wrote to me, I could have encouraged instead of being blasé. I could have asked her how she was targeting her submissions, as careful targeting will cut down on heartbreak. I could have asked her any number of questions that were supportive rather than dismissive. I could have sent her a link to a success story, instead of trotting out the 100 rejections narrative again.

If nothing else, I certainly could have been much more transparent about how it has felt, collecting so many rejections. I will always believe that it’s foolish to give up at only three or four, but it takes some real time to get to 100 or beyond. It can take literal years. I could have shared how much it is a drain trying to stay positive for myself even if I am not always positive externally. I could have shared how I keep all the rejections in an alphabetized card file so I can look at them and remind myself that I am actually doing tangible work, not just moving pixels around on a screen.

I could have shared about how I talk sometimes to writer friends about re-imaging rejection as “reminder”—how when a publication or press or an agent declines, it’s just a nudge to submit again, elsewhere.

It’s a nice idea, in theory. In practice, it’s a lot of trips to the post office or a lot of time on Submittable. It’s also, as far as I can tell, the only way to get there.

If I had read the LitHub article before I had a book, I would have thought, Well, that’s nice for them to be finally published, what about the rest of us. We all know it’s hard to make a living as a writer, yet when I received the largest sum I’d ever been paid for a single essay or story, I didn’t share about this, because it was a kill fee. That’s something other writers should know. Again, it’s an unpredictable business. Any of us who have been doing it for a while have pages of anecdotes like this, though as authors in the contemporary landscape, we’re told to develop our platform, to promote ourselves, to broadcast our wins, not announce our letdowns.

Perhaps the most transparent thing to say to emerging writers is to be open. Listen to the overworked editors who have taken time to offer a sentence or two of feedback—yours is one of hundreds if not thousands of submissions; it’s a big deal to get even nominal comments. And listen if you keep getting the same kind of observations; I definitely did not rewrite my first novel so that the protagonist was male instead of female, but I did rework it, several times, and while the main character isn’t more “likeable,” it’s absolutely a better book for this effort.

You don’t have to get numb to rejection, and you don’t have to accept that it’s always going to be the default response. You should certainly never feel ashamed by it.

If you believe in your work and you push yourself to make it better, if you’ve researched your markets, if you are an active reader, if you are paying attention to what editors ask for, your work will find a home. Maybe you’ll have to endure the 100 rejections scenario, but I really hope not.

When you do get there, shout your wins, but don’t forget to be transparent—for instance, this essay has been through 11 drafts, and I’m still not sure it’s quite right—and loud enough in sharing your failures so that emerging voices can hear you.

Not long ago my father emailed me a reading suggestion: Ayn Rand. He knew I was completing a book about the history of utopian thought – a project that stemmed from the fact that my father raised me on a street called Utopia Road – and he recognized Rand as falling within the constraints of the genre. He liked her, he said. He’d turned up his nose at her for fifty years, and regretted it. He claimed Rand’s utopian avatar, John Galt, reminded him of me.

I declined the suggestion. My father is an avid reader, but politically we’re nothing alike. He’s been trying to get me to read Ann Coulter and Liberal Fascism for years. I explained that I wasn’t likely to fall for Rand’s philosophy, and if he wanted to read a conservative utopia he should try Austin Tappan Wright’sIslandia. (Islandia’s “conservatism” dates from a few decades back, when conservatism wasn’t so far from conservation – it’s all about preservation of the local in the face of globalization.)

My father wasn’t quite ready to let it go. When my girlfriend and I visited a short time later, he pulled out a Rand book, and dared me to read just one paragraph – part of a paragraph! As it happens, that one tiny slice of prose demonstrated that Ayn Rand wasn’t utopian at all; she was something much worse.

And all of this matters because we now have a candidate for the senate who is not only a follower of Rand, but named for her.[1]

Here’s the chunk of writing my father asked me to read, from an introduction to an anniversary edition of Atlas Shrugged.

Incidentally, a sideline observation: if creative fiction writing is a process of translating an abstraction into the concrete, there are three possible grades of such writing: translating an old (known) abstraction (theme or thesis) through the medium of old fiction means, (that is, characters, events or situations used before for that same purpose, that same translation) – this is most of the popular trash; translating an old abstraction through new, original fiction means – this is most of the good literature; creating a new, original abstraction, and translating it through new, original means. This, as far as I know, is only me – my kind of fiction writing.

I read this a couple times – you sort of have to; it’s terrible – and then I attacked it. “Incidentally, a sidelong observation:” is redundant, I said. So is “creative fiction writing.” Rand’s “if/then” lacks a “then,” and there’s no opportunity to challenge the premise that fiction makes the abstract concrete. Most would argue the opposite, if they even agreed to think about it in these terms. Ditto the suggestion that a thesis can or should be abstract. Too, the punctuation of the passage is more than bad – it’s actually attempting to beguile the reader. Heavy, complex thinking requires complicated punctuation, Rand wants us to think, so the presence of complicated punctuation must indicate that the meaning here is heavy and complex. Actually, it’s not.

And that’s about as far as I got before my father and I wound up not in a screaming match, exactly – but something more like a hissing match. We hissed because the things we said were so vile no even we wanted to give them full voice.

“You used to be a writer,” my father hissed. “Now you’re just an elitist.”

Ouch.

But, wait – writers are often elitists, aren’t they? Wasn’t he wrong in suggesting that you sacrifice the first in becoming the second? And anyway, wasn’t Ayn Rand being at least a little elitist in claiming that her fiction is the only fiction that says new things in a new way?

More than her redundancies or punctuation, that’s the problem – because her elitism is not earned. She’s not, in fact, saying new things in a new way. Even my father knew this. He thought of her as utopian, which means she was operating within the boundaries of an established tradition. And he liked the book because he recognized the ideas in it – they weren’t new either. Atlas Shrugged is “known” ideas delivered in a “known” way. By Rand’s definition it’s “popular trash,” which pretty well describes the book’s publishing history.

And that’s what throws Ayn Rand into such a peculiar light today, when her philosophy is perhaps closer than it’s ever been to achieving actual power.

It’s fashionable at the moment to conflate Glenn Beck, the Tea Party movement, and, now, Rand Paul. What’s not been discussed so far is the wide range of open religious sentiment apparent in all of these. Ayn Rand was a famous atheist. Glenn Beck is a curious and dangerous mélange of talking head and televangelist. And the Tea Party wants to regard the Constitution as sacred document.

There’s a reason they’re all in bed together.

In In Utopia I make the argument that extreme conservative utopias (everything from Theodore Hertzka’s Freeland to a range of twentieth century novels suggesting that the path to peace runs through holocaust) are not really utopias at all. Rather, they are reconciliations to an imperfect world. These “utopias” reject the idea that government or planning of any kind can make the world a better place. Much better is a policy of not planning, small government, the invisible arm of the market, social Darwinism as nature’s intent, and so forth. In short, no plan is a better plan.

Here’s why that’s not utopian: that’s how civilization started. When cities emerged, when people began to live in close quarters and form communities, no one had a plan for how they should proceed. The result was Athens, brimming with disease, filth, and crime. Utopian thought begins with Plato and Aristotle offering up improvements – visions of planned societies.

“It has justly been said,” Martin Buber wrote, “that in a positive sense every planning intellect is utopian.”

So why can’t planning for no plan also be a plan? Well, it sort of is – but it’s a plan that assumes chaos will produce a perfect order. Who emerges from the chaos? The elites. Whether it’s greed repackaged as laissez-faire or racism thinly disguised as exceptionalism, conservative “utopias” rationalize worlds where the better few get the most while the numerous many struggle with little. Anymore, who really believes this makes the world better?

These days, not-planning-as-plan isn’t even earnestly meant. Ayn Rand was recently the subject of a new biography, and what her life reveals is that she has a whole lot more in common with L. Ron Hubbard (her career as a screenwriter matches Hubbard’s as a sci-fi guy) than she does with Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or a host of earnest utopians who used an old literary genre to say some new things that did, in fact, make the world a better place.

It’s Hubbard that links Rand back to Beck and the Tea Party. They’re all fundamentalists of one kind or another, and they are the reason “utopia” is now largely synonymous with “scheme.” Like any false prophet, Rand must convince us that her message is new and true (when it’s old and false), and the fake sophistication of her language is as insidious as Glenn Beck’s alligator tears. These false utopians strive not to inspire action and progress, but to recruit followers. They found one in Ron Paul, and now we’re on to the second generation.

I’ll finish with the end of my own two-generation story.

After my father and I finished hissing at each other, my father, to his credit, agreed to read Islandia. I had to pester him by email a little, but he eventually ordered the book. A month passed before he wrote to say he’d loved it, every word, he ate it up – could I recommend more?

Back | 1. Note: Rand Paul himself has denied that he was formally named for Ayn Rand, so I’m taking some liberty here. He has claimed that he was named Randal at birth, went by Randy for much of his life, and his wife started calling him Rand. At the same time, he calls himself a “big fan” of Ayn Rand’s work, and admits that his father met the author. Rand Paul may not have been formally named for Rand, but his embrace of even a nickname amounts to an informal self-naming that is intended as homage – like a monk or a pope.

I don’t know that anything has changed the way I consume information more than the discovery of online feed readers about four years ago. I went from skipping through a handful of sites or relying on someone else’s ability to aggregate information to my own personalized and furiously flowing river of news. For an information glutton like myself, it is a feast that never ends (and that at times threatens to become overwhelming).There’s plenty to be said about the ways in which the internet, and feed readers in particular, continue to change the way we select and consume information, but a recent shift in my habits had me thinking about a particular element of this.Until very recently, I was a user of Bloglines, which could be considered the grand-daddy of web-based feed readers. I started using it because it was more or less the only game in town when I was first looking for a feed reader. But now, as of a few days ago, I have switched to Google Reader. Basically, because of navigational peculiarities between the two tools, after the switch I am now consuming news, blogs, and other information in a subtly different way.With Bloglines, I would go feed by feed. So I might read all the new posts up at Conversational Reading, move on to the new articles in the New York Timesbook section, and then catch up on the new posts at my favorite Baltimore Orioles blog. With Google Reader, on the other hand, the articles and posts are all thrown together. So, upon firing it up, I might see 30 new items waiting for me, all stacked up one after another, a blog post about the Orioles, a restaurant review in the Philly Inquirer, a post at Comics Curmudgeon, and then another blog post about the Orioles.Something about this change struck me. It’s like kicking the information overload that already threatens to overwhelm me up a notch. I’m wondering if I’ll be able to take it. It’s one thing to zip through 500 new items when they are organized by feed, quite another to have them all thrown in together. It’s like reading a seemingly endless stream of non sequiturs.In acclimating myself to the new format, I couldn’t help but think that this is a trend that is only intensifying. The free-for-all, free-associative nature of the internet has been with us from its inception, but this way of consuming has spread to other forms of media as well. I don’t know if I coined this term or not, but I look at us as the “iPod Shuffle generation,” a group that values juxtapositions, randomness, and subjective experience more than paying any heed to externally defined genres. The New Yorker’sAlex Ross says it better in an essay from 2004, “It seems to me that a lot of younger listeners think the way the iPod thinks. They are no longer so invested in a single genre, one that promises to mold their being or save the world.” The radio industry has even formalized this idea with the “Jack FM” format, which Wikipedia says “promote themselves as having a larger and more varied playlist than other commercial radio stations,” and tends to offer up an array of genres back to back in a way that goes against the straitjacketed philosophy of commercial radio.The trend extends to TV as well, in the form of channels like current which plays short “pods,” often viewer-created, about different topics that have little but the channel’s overarching aesthetic to tie them together. With Tivos and DVRs, meanwhile, we create our own mish-moshed television playlists of shows that together, no television exec would dare propose as a primetime lineup. As bandwidth increases, so will the capabilities of our cable boxes, and TV will become ever more personalized and untethered from the channels and networks.This, of course, sounds a lot like a feed reader, a totally user-controlled experience. It feels like the future, but nonetheless it is jarring, and every step in this direction takes some getting used to – or maybe I’m just getting older. Books, meanwhile – the tricks up the Kindle’s sleeve and Kevin Kelly’s controversial “futurism” of a couple years ago aside – seem immune from this mashing up. As such, they will continue to be marginalized as they have been for some time now by the onslaught of TV and the internet, but they will also provide a respite and a more peaceful experience that contrasts the madness of the hyper-aggregated world of information.

1.
It was the fall of 2000, and I had just read David Foster Wallace’s article in Rolling Stone about his experiences hanging out with John McCain aboard the Straight Talk Express, McCain’s cannily christened campaign bus. At the time, McCain was running a spirited, if underdog, race against George W. Bush for the Republican party nomination. McCain had positioned himself as the anti-politician politician, the truth-telling everyman — an image he would reinvent as the “maverick” eight years later, only to be out-mavericked by his own running mate.

Why this strange marriage between a youth-oriented music magazine, a pop-culture savvy young writer, and a sixty-three-year-old-war-hero-turned-politician? It came about because commentators had observed that McCain’s studied lack of politicking seemed to be lifting the stupor of the country’s most politically apathetic — and thus most cherished — demographic. McCain was threatening to awaken the eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-olds who otherwise fell into a deep slumber every fourth November. “No generation of Young Voters,” Wallace announced in only the second sentence of the article, “has ever cared less about politics and politicians than yours.”

Apathy was a common trope, then as now. And although I had no statistics to disprove Wallace’s pronouncement, less than one year earlier, in late November 1999, I had watched in awe as tens of thousands of demonstrators, most of them in that eighteen to thirty-five demographic (as I was myself), descended upon the city of Seattle to protest a meeting of the World Trade Organization. United against the WTO’s policies toward labor, the environment, and economic development, the protestors effectively shut down the meeting, and the city with it — much as the Occupy Wall Street protestors are struggling to do now. The event was exactly the sort of thing we’d long been told could no longer happen — something that existed only in the dewy memories of ’60s nostalgists. My generation was said to be too cynical and self-absorbed to bother with causes. We’d given up on trying to change the world. For David Foster Wallace, our apathy was a form of sales resistance. We’d been marketed to our entire lives. Civic duty had come to seem like just another product.

But I, for one, was feeling optimistic. Maybe what had happened in Seattle was a sign that things were starting to change. Maybe apathy was giving way to engagement. That fall I was teaching composition to college freshmen. I had a classroom full of enthusiastic young students who for the first time in their lives would be old enough to vote. And I had the idea that it would be exciting to spend the semester reading essays like David Foster Wallace’s and writing about what it meant to be young, to have ideals, to live in a democracy, and to have a political voice. As I handed out the syllabus on the first day of class, gazing out upon their fresh, eager faces, I thought how satisfying it would be to prove those naysayers wrong.

The students saw the reading list. The collective groan was audible.

As it turned out, the naysayers were right.

2.
That Americans hate politics is something everyone seems to agree on, even if no one knows exactly why. Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne has written that American hatred of politics derives from the “false polarization” created by liberalism and conservatism, a consequence of the cultural divisions that arose in the 1960s. For David Foster Wallace the culprit is the numbness of living in a consumer society. But both arguments suppose that, in the eras before Madison Avenue and Haight-Ashbury, Americans were thronging to rallies to shake hands with our beloved public servants. It may be true that we did so in larger numbers then than we do now, but there’s nevertheless a general sense that right from the start we’ve been a nation of individuals who have regarded politics with suspicion.

3.
I grew up in the suburbs of Central New York in a middle-class family with college-educated parents whose political ideologies were a complete mystery to me. To say “mystery,” though, suggests I spent any time actually wondering what their ideologies were. I didn’t. I had no idea whom they voted for, and I seldom had any idea who was even running. My after-school activities were sports, not debate club. If I looked at the newspaper, it was to study box scores. In this I was no different from any of the rest of my friends.

Like a lot of kids in my position, my own political awakening, such as it was, occurred in college, but probably not in the way it was supposed to. It was the mid-’90s, and I remember one of my first college girlfriends — a feminist when it was still fashionable to confess to being such a thing — badgering me into taking a position on abortion. “I don’t know,” I finally admitted. “I don’t know if it’s right or wrong.”

“If you don’t know,” she said, not bothering to conceal her exasperation, “that means you’re pro-choice.”

I decided to take her word for it.

The main reason I’d chosen this college — one of the lowest tier in the New York state system — was its proximity to mountains. Some people went to college to learn and to expand their horizons. I wanted to go backpacking. Also, it was one of the few colleges that would have me. My apathy for politics was exceeded only by my indifference toward school work.

But once at college, my attitude gradually began to change. My crash course in women’s rights — compliments of my girlfriend — was an important first step. I began to wonder what else I was supposed to know.

My roommate and I had no TV. The internet wasn’t yet widespread. Aside from my girlfriend, the campus had virtually no detectable political pulse. But this small mountain town, which lacked virtually everything else, at least had a public radio station. The hour in the afternoon when they broke with pallid classical music to broadcast an international news program became a fixture of my college curriculum. It was both daunting and exhilarating to discover how big the world actually was, and how little of it I understood.

By my sophomore year, backpacking was no longer enough. I’d decided I was ready for something more. So I set my mind on a plan to escape, and suddenly I found myself willing to do even the unthinkable: study. I buried myself in books, pushed myself to write, and managed to make the dean’s list. And then, before the start of my junior year, I transferred from the mountains of New York to the plains of Ohio, to a school at the opposite end of every measurable spectrum: Antioch College, a place so infamous for countercultural rabble-rousing that its bookstore sold T-shirts touting the college’s unofficial slogan, “Boot Camp for the Revolution.” Overblown rhetoric or not, the campus certainly looked like a boot camp, with barrack-like dormitories and grassless, muddy footpaths. I was both awestruck and dazed. Even though it was 1996, not 1966, at Antioch the revolution was still very much alive. The school’s official slogan, borrowed from Horace Mann, the school’s founder, was “Be ashamed to die until you have won some small victory for humanity.” Even if I wasn’t quite ready to be worrying about how my tombstone might read, I liked the idea of being surrounded by people who were. What better way to make up for all those years of indifference than full immersion at the epicenter of activism?

But in all the excitement of starting over, I forgot to ask myself one important question: where in this atmosphere did someone like me belong? Although I had managed to shake off my apathy, I had no real intention of replacing it with fervor. I was introverted and increasingly bookish. I had no ideology. I was merely curious. My Antioch classmates wanted to change the world; I mostly just wanted to write short stories.

Instead of plotting victories for humanity, I spent my college years cloistered in the tiny office of the Antioch Review, logging fiction and poetry submissions on index cards. The Antioch Review is one of the longest-running literary journals in the country. I was one of the only students at the college who knew it even existed.

The other thing Antioch is known for, besides its activist student body, is being the butt of jokes. In the early 1990s, at the height of the culture wars, the school was a cautionary tale about the perils of political correctness, culminating in a Saturday Night Live skit lampooning the school’s Sexual Offense Prevention Policy. The SOPP was a document that required verbal permission before any sort of sexual contact could be initiated.

If you missed the skit, just close your eyes and picture a trembling Chris Farley (playing a “nose tackle and a Sigma Alpha Epsilon brother”) asking a scowling Shannen Doherty, “Can I put my hands on your buttocks?”

Needless to say, Antioch has neither a football team nor fraternities. And of course, Shannen Doherty said no. Within this triangulation you find the familiar caricature of progressive politics: that it’s the exclusive domain of the humorless and dull. Antioch, though, was anything but dull. Given the proliferation of unicycles and art cars and tattoos, the place often felt more like a circus than a campus. What the SNL skit overlooked was the important fact that the SOPP had been written and introduced entirely by the students themselves. Sexual harassment on college campuses was a problem; Antioch students had decided to come up with a solution. I appreciated the bullshit-free way in which my peers had set out to fix something that they believed was broken. If I’d been asked to take part, though, I have no doubt I’d have said no.

4.
David Foster Wallace was probably right that no generation has cared less about politics than Generation Y. Then again, whoever said the same thing about my Generation X would have been right, too, as would whoever said it about the generation before that. The idea that Americans are selfish and individualistic isn’t new. There’s even a school of thought that suggests the idea is virtually as old as the nation itself, that these tendencies might be, paradoxically, an inheritance of the Puritans themselves. The Puritans’ relentless pursuit of self-denial, the argument goes, wound up turning the corner into self-indulgence. So closely did they identify themselves with the divine America that they came to feel they actually personified it. Which led, in a roundabout way, to that great American mystic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose preachings about self-reliance and transcendentalism begot Walt Whitman’s songs of himself; they became something of a national anthem. Ever since then, it seems, the majority of us have beat a hasty retreat from public life.

There are numerous variations on this idea, with different starting points and interpretations. Literary scholar R. W. B. Lewis calls his version of this mythic, individualist national identity “the American Adam.” He traces its evolution from Emerson to Thoreau to Whitman, and on to the early American novelists James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry James. Lewis describes the American Adam, celebrated in this literary lineage, as “an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.” The American Adam is a figure of pure innocence, focused inward, detached from the larger concerns of the world. He is Adam before the Fall.

5.
If I was failing to become everything Horace Mann might have wanted me to be, I at least got out of my time at Antioch an awareness of the complicated matrix of political issues surrounding everything we do, including the telling of stories. I learned that even great works of literature were products of social values and ideas, too many of which often went unexamined. I came to understand instinctively what George Orwell meant when he wrote, three decades before Fredric Jameson, that “no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

While at Antioch, my tolerance toward the compatibility of literature and politics gradually grew. I developed an interest — sacrilegious for a budding writer — in critical theory: Marxists and postcolonialists and postmodernists. The whole solemn crowd. I spent a seminar on Toni Morrison deconstructing the ways in which Beloved, Song of Solomon, Sula, and her other novels blended controversial social issues such as slavery and race with high art.

During the two years I spent at Antioch, my opinions did eventually grow stronger, my convictions more firm. My admiration grew as well for my classmates — for their passion and determination. They were as far from the American Adam as one could get. And yet, I didn’t try to emulate them. Or even to join them. I remained probably the only student at Antioch who took no part in demonstrations. Whenever my classmates were organizing and meeting and debating, I was somewhere else.

As was my tendency with most things, I fed my fascination with political activism by reading. I read everything I could find: Raoul Vaneigem’sThe Revolution of Everyday Life, histories of the Situationists, the SDS, the Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, the Angry Brigade. I read Hakim Bey and borrowed whatever dog-eared tracts my friends had lying around. I was like an anthropologist trying to decipher some exotic alien society. I wanted to understand their culture, their myths and religion. I wanted to know what propelled them. I wanted to know, in short, what made them so different from me.

In time I learned that there were things I lacked that true activists, like my classmates, had in abundance. Above all else, a tolerance for confrontation and a productive ability to channel anger. My instincts were hopelessly reversed. When it came to the issues I cared about most, what got triggered within me was more often flight than fight. The injustices of the world made me indignant, but more than that, they made me depressed. And the only way to escape the depression was to detach. This has remained true even as I’ve gotten older. My attraction for politics is still, more often than not, outweighed by my aversion.

In 2000, when George W. Bush was handed the presidency through a Supreme Court decision, it was the process that I wanted my students to be interested in. What mattered was taking part and caring, not about the outcome, but about why a thing like democracy was important.

In 2004, when Bush was reelected, I turned my radio off, and I’m not exaggerating when I say a year passed before I was able to turn it back on.

6.
My attempt to interest that class of freshmen in writing about what it meant to be political was far from a success. The fault for its failure was undoubtedly mine. After all, how could I expect them to unravel their complicated feelings about democracy and political identity when I was still struggling to do so myself?

But even after the class was over and I packed my syllabus permanently away, these questions about my political self continued to nag at me. Then, in 2002, I happened to read an article in the New York Times about the difficult political situation in Haiti. The focus of the article was an enormous estate on that tumultuous island that had become occupied by armed gangs. In addition to being the site of a once-lavish hotel, the estate was also said to contain the last scrap of the island’s ravaged tropical rainforest. Against the armed intruders the article pitted the estate’s caretaker, a white Canadian whose mission was to try to save the estate, particularly the forest, from oblivion. (This was almost eight years before the devastating earthquake and cholera epidemic.) At the time, my knowledge of Haiti was sketchy, but I knew it was a place embroiled in unrest. I couldn’t help wondering what it meant that this Edenic estate had ever existed here, and what it meant for someone to be trying to preserve it amid widespread environmental destruction and political upheaval.

My desire to understand the complex situation there led me to a related article from twenty-seven years earlier. “A New Retreat for the Rich — Surrounded by Tumbledown Shacks” documented a party held to celebrate the opening of the hotel on that very estate in January 1974 (a year and a half before I was born). With a mixture of bewilderment and contempt, its author described the jet-setters and society figures gathered poolside in tuxedos and diamonds, utterly oblivious of the dire poverty and political instability surrounding them even then. The hotel had been built atop a powder keg. In fact, the earlier article could in retrospect be said to predict the one that would first catch my eye more than a quarter century later.

There was also a seemingly minor detail that both articles mentioned in passing. But this detail captured my imagination almost as much as the rest: at the turn of the nineteenth century the estate had been the home of Charles Leclerc, a French general who in 1801 had been sent by his brother-in-law, Napoleon Bonaparte, to restore slavery on the French colony. Since 1791, the slaves, led in part by Toussaint L’Ouverture, had been fighting to win their independence. Not long after they succeeded, Napoleon dispatched Leclerc to take it back.

But despite his warships and his forty thousand troops, Leclerc’s army was decimated. The general himself succumbed to yellow fever. His successor, Rochambeau, fared no better. Although L’Ouverture would not live to see it, the war he had helped to wage became the first successful slave rebellion in history. In 1804, Haiti became the world’s first independent black republic.

This bloody episode was not, however, the end of Haiti’s troubles. It was instead the beginning of a different struggle. The following two hundred years have been characterized by nearly perpetual autocratic rule and fairly regular American meddling. At the time of my initial research, Haiti was in the midst of a difficult transition to democracy. The country’s first popularly elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, brought to power in 1990, had already been overthrown once by a military coup. He’d been reelected in 2000 for a second term, but alleged irregularities and deep divisions among the electorate had created a tense, often violent atmosphere.

Amy Wilentz’sRainy Season chronicles the plight of Haiti’s poor and the rise of Aristide, their champion, from firebrand priest to politician. The book is the story of a nation that for generations has suffered oppression most Americans can barely fathom. But the book also makes clear that this is not a nation of passive victims. In Haiti, brutality has always met resistance. The struggles of individuals, communities, and the populace as a whole reveal a relentless determination to see justice done — a determination still plainly visible in the midst of post-earthquake reconstruction and a new round of democratic elections.

For many Americans, politics is an abstraction, something that happens somewhere else, overseen by people we pay to handle things so we don’t have to think about them. In a place like Haiti, I came to see, politics is virtually inescapable. In 1964, while in exile during the reign of dictator Françoise Duvalier, Haitian scholar (and future president) Leslie Manigat wrote of the situation back home, “Everything is political… The reputation earned by an engineer in his special field is regarded as a political trump. The prestige that a professor gains among his students may represent a political threat to the government… Such is the encroachment of politics on all aspects of life that if a man does not go into politics, politics itself comes to him.”

Poring over newspaper articles from the country’s recent past, I found one from 1987, not long after the thirty-year father-and-son Duvalier dictatorship finally came to an end. The constitutionally required “free and fair” elections scheduled for that year — the nation’s first — pitted candidates from numerous camps against one another. And as the ruling military junta began to realize that it stood no chance of retaining power, they concluded that their only recourse was to stop the election from taking place. This they accomplished by orchestrating a campaign of violence culminating in a daylight attack on a school where at least two dozen men, women, and children were slaughtered while waiting to vote.

Could there be any more stark a contrast than between David Foster Wallace’s bemoaning of voter apathy in the U.S. and the situation in Haiti, where in 1987, daring to vote could get a person killed, and where people persisted in doing it anyway? For most of us, the impossibility of something like this happening in our own lives, in our own country, makes the horror feel pretty abstract, too. We can’t conceive of such a world, even though it’s less than a two-hour flight from Miami.

The more I read about Haiti, the more I came to believe that conceiving of such a world is one of the most important things literature can do. And I realized that some of my favorite novels, the ones to which I felt the greatest affinity, were concerned with politically averse individuals caught in the middle of similarly fraught political situations. I’m thinking, for instance, of Roberto Bolaño’sBy Night in Chile, which depicts the complicity in dictatorial brutality of a priest who wants nothing more than to be a poet. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, by Ayi Kwei Armah, places a government clerk stricken with malaise in the center of Ghanaian political and social turmoil. And many of J. M. Coetzee’s novels explore this terrain, too, including Waiting for the Barbarians, in which an unnamed magistrate wishes to disassociate himself from the evils of the empire he serves. It’s worth noting that none of these are American novels. Which suggests that maybe political aversion isn’t limited to our shores after all.

It probably shouldn’t be surprising then that the book I came to write, based in part on the events I’d been reading about in Haiti, also placed political aversion at its core. I don’t think it was a conscious decision, but it was clearly a symptom of what my mind was working through. I couldn’t help asking, as I looked back on my own complicated relationship with politics: if I had been born in such a place, how might I have been different? Might I have been stronger, someone with the courage to take a stand? Or might I have found a way to be the same detached observer that I am? Or something even more extreme: a true American Adam, determined to remain innocent in a place where such a luxury seemed inconceivable, where attempts to secure it were doomed to fail? These questions felt important to me.

But the questions also felt personal. It soon became clear that despite writing about someone whose circumstances and skin color and place of birth could hardly have been more different from my own, I was writing in large part about myself. In fact, I was writing, albeit in a much different form, the sort of thing I had asked my students to write back in 2000 — about what it meant to have ideals and a political voice, and about the strength it sometimes took to express them, especially when it was so much easier not to. It’s taken me more than ten years to do what I hoped they could accomplish in a semester. Little did I know how difficult an assignment it would turn out to be.

1.
What you do when apartment hunting online, and what a lot of people do, I imagine, is you plug in your preferred neighborhood/price range/amenities/etc., and then out pops a long list of results that you further refine by imagining a very specific and very fictionalized narrative involving a version of yourself that isn’t necessarily true right now but could be true if you lived in apartment X. No, you’ve never wielded a wrench for any longer than the time it takes to pass it to your dad, but why couldn’t you fix a fixer-upper? Or be the kind of person to share one bathroom with six other roommates? Or live with a Ukrainian family that’s gone for five months out of the year, but whose kids you’re expected to babysit as per your new rental agreement?

I asked myself these questions a few weeks after my girlfriend came home one night (while I was sautéing garlic shrimp in our L.A. apartment) and told me that it was over. We’d lived together for 10 years in eight different apartments on two separate coasts, and although she said that it might not feel like it right now, this was going to be a good thing. She said that now, I’d finally be able to move back to the city I loved: New York.

2.
Returning home to your parents’ house after a breakup is a little bit like crawling back into the womb 30 years after you’re born: it’s kind of embarrassing and unpleasant for everyone involved, but once you get settled it’s really not that bad. Mom turned into a kind of gastronomic DJ, taking nightly requests and cooking up a few of her greatest hits, while dad hovered around my bedroom and offered sage advice like, “We never really thought you guys were all that compatible to begin with,” and “When do you think you’ll start looking for your own place?” — which is around the time I happened to stumble across a 2-bedroom townhouse in Park Slope for $900 a month. It had crown moldings and vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows above the doors. It was the first place I found where you didn’t have to superimpose better versions of yourself onto the provided pictures. You could be mediocre at best, or even obnoxious, and still take full advantage of that atrium overlooking the backyard. So I emailed the owner and got this reply:

Dear David
I thank you for your interest in my house and assure you that I and my daughter from London who has lived there for 10 years with me love it as much as you will. Rest assured that it is in excellent condition and that included in the price are heat, hot water, cable, central air and free Wi-Fi! However, there is one thing you should know before I can rent to you my daughter’s apartment, whose name is Rosemary, and has been sick in the hospital with a very rare illness…

The letter went on like that for a few more paragraphs, explaining that the money was needed up front in order to secure both the apartment and, conveniently, to help cover the cost of Rosemary’s hospital bills.

Having been living at home I’d had the opportunity to catch up on a few movies I’d been meaning to watch, namely Captain Phillips on DVD, and I couldn’t help but imagine a gaunt, Somali man sitting in the pirate’s equivalent of an Internet café. I wondered if these sorts of schemes ever worked and if so on whom?

“Hey Dad,” I said. “Check out this amazing apartment I just found.”

After reading the letter my Dad looked up and raised his eyebrows like wire-transferring $900 U.S. into Mrs. Potter’s Western Union account was something I might want to consider.

“I mean it’s sad,” he said, “that her daughter has cancer of the meninges, but David: You’d be a fool to walk away from that price.”

My sister said that in her experience, you couldn’t really rent a Brooklyn apartment if you weren’t already living in Brooklyn and that yes, it was a catch-22, but that was why so many couples were prematurely moving in with each other and inevitably breaking up, and then being forced to live with their exes while trying to find another place, which was exactly the situation my sister was in now. She said that if I didn’t mind a little awkwardness with regard to her ex boyfriend occasionally stopping by, I was more than welcome to sleep on her couch. Also, she said she’d been thinking a lot about our similar situations and, at least financially, didn’t it make sense if we lived together?

It did. And we’d actually done this for six weeks once before when she was living in Chelsea and I was in college. We got into a fight one night and Lauren ended up throwing my books out her 7th-story window and I ended up trawling the streets of SoHo at 3:00 in the morning hoping that something bad but-not-too-bad would happen to me so that she’d be riddled with a lifetime of guilt and regret. But we were older now. We were more mature. We had learned from out past mistakes and we could — no, we would — live together.

So I showed her a place I’d found online with tin ceilings and exposed brick walls I thought she’d like, and a stand-up Jacuzzi that later, she’d tell me, looked like it belonged on a porn set.

“Do you think it’s a Somali scam?” she asked (apparently she had also just watched Captain Phillips on DVD).

“Maybe it’s like a gem,” I said.

“Maybe it’s a scam and we’re going to get murdered when we show up,” she said.

“Because that’s weird,” I said. “I’m not going to ask her what her last name is. She sounds nice and I thinks she’s a real person and I don’t want her to think that we’re weird.”

“Dave,” my sister said. “You’re my brother. And we’re about to go look at a porn set to see if we want to live there.”

3.
When I met Lauren outside of the apartment she hugged me and asked if I was ready to get gang-banged.

Hana showed up a few minutes later and to our relief, she was not a Somali pirate at all. She was from Croatia, I think, or somewhere vaguely Slavic where people have high cheekbones and long, blonde hair. I wondered if she was looking for a roommate and if she’d ever tried garlic shrimp before.

We followed her up a quickly sketched staircase and inside where it looked exactly like the photos except smaller. Smaller exposed cooling ducts, smaller tin ceilings, and smaller porn vibes.

“There’s a urinal in the bathroom,” my sister pointed out.

“Yes,” Hana told us. “This is very unique to this apartment. No other apartment has urinal like this.”

I walked into the bathroom and my sister nodded at the stand-up Jacuzzi. Later she would tell me that it reminded her of a Winnebago shower, or a shower where “murders happen.”

“Do you have the dimensions of this room?” Lauren asked, standing in the smaller of the two bedrooms.

I looked at Hana who was shaking her head. She was so cute, Hana. So pretty and nice. I probably would’ve fallen in love with anyone if they promised not to leave me after ten years. Talking out of the side of her mouth she said, “I don’t know exactly, but I’m about four feet this way?” She spread her arms and touched her fingers against one wall and then, to our delight, she began to spiral in lazy circles across the length of the room. I didn’t know if we were supposed to clap when she was finished, but a few mental calculations later and she announced that the whole thing was maybe eight feet by six?

“Perfect!” I said.

I wondered if Hana measured everything like this, or just apartments. I guessed that she was probably my age. Did she have a boyfriend? It would be weird to ask. She mentioned something about living in Queens. I could probably live in Queens. I could live anywhere so long as my apartment was measured in pirouettes and tour jetes.

Lauren widened her eyes.

“Can we come back tomorrow and take some measurements?” I asked. It would be like a second date.

4.
“So? Well? What did you think?”

“What did you think?” my sister said when we were outside, walking.

“Beautiful,” I said. “A little foreign, but I really loved it.”

“What about the urinal in the bathroom?”

“It’s unique,” I said.

“Also, did you notice that there were speakers in the walls? And how there were wires draped all over the floors? And how you couldn’t open that one closet? And the lights in the hallway were blue? Why were they blue? I felt like I was at a nightclub.”

“Huh,” I said. “I didn’t notice.” I pictured inviting Hana over for some clubbing when my sister was out.

“I think we’d get murdered in that bathroom,” Lauren said, and then she shook her head. “I’m really sorry, Dave. I don’t think I can picture myself living there.”

She said that she was already in talks with another real estate agency and that I was kind of on my own now, so I texted Hana and told her I couldn’t meet her for measurements. At least I was breaking it off with her instead of the other way around.

5.
The next afternoon my Nike Fuelband said that I had already walked 15 miles. I ruptured something along the top of my foot because of the 10-year-old Pumas Mom told me not to wear, and then I drank 2 liters of coconut water in order to rehydrate, only to find out afterwards that coconut water can be a really powerful laxative for some people — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was 2:30 when I limped into the real estate agency that had a dusty neon sign out front that was only partially lit. Inside it smelled like burnt coffee, but coffee that had pockets of morning breath in it that I kept accidentally walking into and then, like a tired boxer, weaving away from long after I’d already been hit.

“Hello?” I asked.

“Hello,” a voice said.

Someone, about my age with slicked back hair and an expression that can only be described as dripping, pulled open a room divider that I’m almost positive was his bed sheet. He shook my hand, introducing himself as Anthony and then offered me a seat long after I’d already taken one. He looked sad, Anthony did, like he hadn’t rented an apartment in months, and he kept glancing over his shoulder at a fish tank that had a plastic model of Manhattan’s skyline in it, but no discernable fish. I wanted to help him out, to make him happier, and he said he wanted to help me too, so we agreed to meet somewhere on the other side of town where he told me he had a place that was exactly what I was looking for.

He pulled up in a silver Town Car and sat in the driver’s seat for a really long time. He looked sadder than he did before, and occasionally we’d catch each other’s eye in the rearview mirror and I’d smile at him and he’d look away like he hadn’t seen me. He was shuffling papers and giving off the impression that he was very busy; so I tried to look busy too, fake scrolling on my iPhone, whose battery had just died.

Eventually he got out of his car, crossed the street, and handed me a clipboard.

“What’s this?”

“You have to sign it,” he said. “It’s company policy.”

“What for?”

“Because we’re walking into an occupied residence and this states that you’re not going to take anything.”

“What would I take?” I asked.

Anthony looked at me like he was going to slit his wrists.

“You’d be surprised,” he said.

The address of the apartment he was going to show me was three streets and one avenue away from the address that he told me to meet him at, and I felt like he was leading me to some Batcave that only he knew about. I wondered if he ever blindfolded his clients, or spun them around in circles, or threatened their family if they talked, but he didn’t talk much, he just lumbered forward, sighing heavily every couple of blocks. I wanted to ask Anthony questions like why was he sadder than before? And wasn’t it nice to get outside? And what was he doing in his Lincoln town car that whole time? But he was stopping in front of an apartment across the street from a cemetery now and pulling out a ring of keys.

“All right,” he said. “You ready?”

6.
The hallway was barely wider than shoulder width and when we reached the top of a long, narrow staircase, Anthony knocked on a door and then took a few steps back. He was sweating so I smiled and said something stupid like, “Hot, huh?”, which made him visually sadder.

Was this the apartment I was going to get murdered in? Would Anthony murder me? Or would he try to help me if I was getting murdered? I’m not sure that I would help him, honestly. I think I might offer some advice over my shoulder as I was running away like, “Stay positive,” or “Thank you for all your help.”

He opened the door and we walked into the kitchen where there were two twin redheads sitting on a blow-up chair in the corner of the room.

“Oh — hello,” I said.

“Hi,” they said in unison.

“This is the kitchen,” Anthony said. “Pretty good size. Decent refrigerator. Good space all around.”

I nodded, wondering why there were redheads in blow-up chairs, and if this was what Anthony had been so upset about. I felt that on the one hand if I looked at them directly, they might lunge at me, but if I didn’t look at them they would do something worse, so I spent the whole time pretending to be impressed by things I wasn’t actually impressed by, like how the windows opened almost all the way, and how there was very little water-damage under the sink, and how the smoke detector was actually a smoke detector/carbon monoxide detector, while secretly I was watching them in my periphery.

It must have been 80 degrees outside and 95 in here. Anthony was sweating. The redheads were sweating. I was sweating.

“How do you guys like living here?” I asked, figuring that if I kept them talking it would be harder for them to sneak up on me.

“Good,” one of them said.

“Nice,” said the other.

I remembered seeing something on an episode of Oprah once about how prisoners that appealed to their captor’s humanity had the greatest chance of escape so I told them that I was just getting out of a 10-year relationship and then followed Anthony into the bedroom. The only reason I knew it was the bedroom was because there was a blow up mattress on the floor. Later, I’d realize that the twins’ penchant for inflatable furniture had nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with that narrow hallway we ascended when we first walked in. Real furniture was not an option in this junior 1-bedroom apartment that was across the street from a cemetery.

I couldn’t really picture myself living here. But I tried anyway. I had a premonition of standing in the middle of a pretty-decent sized kitchen, sautéing garlic shrimp for my blow-up girlfriend.

“Here’s the bathroom,” Anthony said, opening the shower. The tiles were covered in scum and there was a sizable puff of red hair clogging the drain.

“Want to see the basement?”

I shook my head.

“Decent-sized storage,” he said.

I shook my head again and we left.

7.
Outside, Anthony wanted to know what I thought of the place, so I lied and said that I thought it was really nice, which made him smile. He told me to put down a deposit to make sure that nobody else took it and I lied again and said that I would, and then told him the truth, and said that I had to go.

My next appointment was conveniently located within walking distance from the cemetery, and although I felt my stomach lurching, I figured it was just residual fear.

I was going to meet Kiki, a 30-year-old nurse-in-training who had complimented me so many times in her reply email, I almost didn’t care what her apartment looked like.

When I got there two girls were sitting on Kiki’s stoop.

“Kiki?” I asked.

The first girl shook her head and explained that they were waiting for Kiki also.

“Ah, double-booked,” I said, trying to make small talk.

The girl who was talking to me, and who was now touching my shoulders a lot, looked exactly like the actress Lindsay Lohan if Lindsay Lohan got stung by bees. Her quieter, larger counterpart, who I nicknamed Silent Bobbie, said nothing at all — didn’t even look up — she was too busy being engrossed with The Simpson’s game on her phone.

“If worst comes to worst,” Lindsay said, “we might have to arm wrestle you for the place.”

I smiled.

“Or mud wrestle,” she said.

I smiled again.

“Or we could have a dance off,” she said. “Or a staring contest.” She widened her eyes, and put her face close to mine, so I laughed uncomfortably, hoping to concede defeat.

“So what do you guys do?” I asked.

“Oh, we’re comedians,” Lindsay said.

The whole time we were talking, Lindsay kept touching my shoulders and chest and telling me things about myself that I already knew like how I was wearing a button down shirt, and how my hair had some product in it but not a lot, and that my sunglasses were aviators. I felt more self-conscious than flattered, really, and spent the whole time scanning the street for signs of Kiki.

When she finally showed up she was wearing an all-spandex outfit and carrying a rolled-up Yoga matt under one arm and walking a black lab, whose name, she said, was Goose.

Silent Bobbie, who had said nothing up until this point, was now telling Kiki how much she loved dogs and Lindsay was saying, “I don’t love all dogs but I really love this one!”

I couldn’t believe it. I was being thrown under the proverbial bus. We hadn’t even set foot into the apartment and already we were elbow deep in mud pits.

“I like dogs too,” I heard myself say.

I squeezed between the two of them and got down on Goose’s level and started petting her head at the exact moment Kiki stopped watching me.

“So let me give you the grand tour,” she said. “Come on Goose!”

“He’s licking me so much I don’t know if he wants to go,” I laughed.

8.
I hated the thought of living with Kiki — couldn’t imagine doing it — the whole place was dark and cluttered and she’d turned her living room into a makeshift bedroom where she said that she and her boyfriend spent most of their time. Still though, a certain part of me wanted her approval. I wanted her to pick me over Laurel and Hardy over there. I wanted to win at apartments — to be crowned the Reigning King of Roommates.

Maybe I was looking at it the wrong way. Maybe Kiki and her boyfriend and Goose and I could snuggle up on their makeshift bed and watch Saturday morning cartoons. Had I told her that I could cook? I could make Sunday brunch for everyone! I could over-function like I had in my last relationship. Under special talents on my imagined resume I could write: will consider indentured servitude.

As I was leaving, I couldn’t help but remember what my ex-girlfriend said during those last few weeks when we were breaking up.

“It’s not you,” she told me. “It’s us.”

9.
My last interview was with an incredibly soft-spoken girl named Sara who had the odd and distracting habit of rolling her eyes back into her head and fluttering her eyelids whenever she spoke. She arrived at the front door barefoot and braless under a blue cotton dress, and was so quiet, it should be pointed out, that the sounds my stomach was now making, occasionally drowned her out.

I, by contrast, felt like I was yelling at her, that my every movement was taking place at hyper-speed, and that I was giving her the impression that I was so ecstatic about this closet-sized bedroom she was showing me, I might induce in her a seizure or a stroke. She said that we could move all of the cleaning supplies off of that shelf in my would-be bedroom, and that I could sometimes use the living room, but most of the time she’d prefer that I make myself scarce. Also, she said, the rent was $1,300 a month.

“Do you maybe want to sit down and talk about some of your interests and what you like to do and maybe what you expect out of me as your roommate?” she asked.

My stomach made a sound like it was going to the bathroom inside of itself, and then I don’t remember much after that. It happened in bits and pieces, really: me doubling over on the F train and running down Atlantic Avenue and tumbling into my sister’s apartment, past her living room and into her bathroom, where I sat down for the first time all day. I checked my phone for any new emails.

Dear Dave,
You seemed like a really great guy but unfortunately, I don’t think it’s going to work. All the best in finding someone. Sara.

10.
The place that I eventually settled on was a clean, well-lit studio off of 5th Ave, about the size and shape of a small rectangle. The girl that showed it to me texted me before I came over to say that her friend was visiting from out of town and that they’d had, “A really rough night,” the night before. I asked her what time we could meet after 12:00 and she said, “Sounds great!”

“1:30?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “240 7th Street.”

I figure that if I ever get a chance to tell my ex-girlfriend about my new apartment, I’m going to be honest with her. I’ll say that it’s better than the first two places we moved into when we were kids, but that it can’t compare to some of The Greats we ended up living in together while we were growing up. Dad mentioned on the phone the other day that I didn’t have to worry about rolling out of bed and stumbling into the bathroom anymore; now I could just roll and go. But all of my books are within arm’s reach, and whenever my neighbors throw a party in their backyard, I can’t help but sit in my window and pretend like I was invited. I’ll say all of this, but I’ll also say that I like it, because I do. I’ll say that like a lot of New York apartments, mine is decidedly small: wherever I go, I’m already there.